He Had Seen the Future and it Worked

While many liberals and leftists supported the populist uprising that pitted unarmed masses against one of the world’s best-armed regimes, none welcomed the announcement of the growing power of radical Islam with the portentous lyricism that Foucault brought to his brief, and never repeated, foray into journalism…Foucault’s Iranian adventure was a “tragic and farcical error” that fits into a long tradition of ill-informed French intellectuals spouting off about distant revolutions, says James Miller, whose 1993 biography “The Passion of Michel Foucault” contains one of the few previous English-language accounts of the episode. Indeed, Foucault’s search for an alternative that was absolutely other to liberal democracy seems peculiarly reckless in light of political Islam’s subsequent career, and makes for odd reading now as observers search for traditions in Islam that are compatible with liberal democracy.

Foucault was virtually alone among Western observers, Anderson and Afary argue, in embracing the specifically Islamist wing of the revolution. Indeed, Foucault pokes fun at the secular leftists who thought they could use the Islamists as a weapon for their own purposes; the Islamists alone, he believed, reflected the “perfectly unified collective will” of the people.

Oh, Christ. How fucking stupid can you get. Especially when you’re someone who’s famous for sniffing out the insidious, non-obvious forms of domination and power. ‘The perfectly unified collective will of the people’ – what the hell would that be? Unless they all happen to be pod people, there is no such thing! You’d think anyone with even the most rudimentary acquaintance with actual human beings, let alone a theorist of power, would be well aware of that. No – what there is is the perfectly unified collective will of some people, which is a terrific instrument for tyrannizing over the rest of the people. The more ‘perfectly unified’ i.e. passionately held, unquestioned and unquestionable, mindless, irrational, fervent it is, the more sharp and thorough an instrument it is. It’s something to be terrified of, not something to rejoice at. Especially – especially (did he miss it because it’s so god damn obvious?) – if the people with the perfectly unified enraged collective will are the stronger part of the people – to wit, the men – the adult men, the straight men, the majority-religion men. Along with the collective will thing, they have sticks and whips and fists.

The Iranian Revolution, Anderson and Afary write, appealed to certain of Foucault’s characteristic preoccupations — with the spontaneous eruption of resistance to established power, the exploration of the limits of rationality, and the creativity unleashed by people willing to risk death…In his articles, Foucault compared the Islamists to Savonarola, the Anabaptists, and Cromwell’s militant Puritans. The comparisons were intended to flatter.

Savonarola! And what did he think Savonarola would have thought of someone like him?! The limits of rationality, the creativity unleashed by people willing to risk death – oh, hell. He pretty much was getting misty-eyed at ‘Triumph of the Will’ then.

“We think of Foucault as this very cool, unsentimental thinker who would be immune to the revolutionary romanticism that has overtaken intellectuals who covered up Stalin’s atrocities or Mao’s…But in this case, he abandoned much of his critical perspective in his intoxication with what he saw in Iran. Here was a great philosopher of difference who looked around him in Iran and everywhere saw unanimity.”

Saw it, and cheered it on. Very clever. Well done.

Foucault, who died in 1984, refused to engage in public mea culpas, despite the fierce debate that broke out in France over his ideas about Iran…Anderson says that the debate over these 25- year-old writings has relevance when some leftists focus more energy on criticizing an administration they scorn than on speaking against a radical Islamist movement that also violates all their cherished ideals.

But, some people think Foucault’s view had some merit.

Other Foucault scholars also see an enduring value in his turn toward political spirituality. James Bernauer, a Jesuit priest who teaches philosophy at Boston College and has written several books on Foucault and theology, sees in the late Foucault’s embrace of spirituality a resource for thinking about how to integrate politics and religion…”Foucault had an ability to see this, to see past the pervasive secularism of French intellectual life, that was quite remarkable.

Ah, a Jesuit priest! Well in that case. No, I’ll stick with that pervasive secularism deal, thanks. The more pervasive the better.

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4 Responses to “He Had Seen the Future and it Worked”

Examining postmodern writing – excuse me, one must say “discourse” or “texts,” never merely “writing” – one sees this again and again. These people play at a game which looks remarkably similar to critical thinking in some ways, especially with the various flavors of Theory (post-structural, post-colonial, always-post-something-or-other) being so focused on exposing hidden assumptions. Exposing hidden assumptions is without question A GOOD THING: It is absolutely necessary for ferreting out truths.

Necessary, but hardly sufficient. If assumption-questioning and other negative/critical moves are the only steps one takes in argument, one can never positively establish any claim – only undermine other claims. And so EVERY positive claim I’ve ever encountered coming from any of these Theory-mongers has been an unsupported assertion, and quite often a tragically absurd or obviously false assertion at that. Foucault’s embarrassing nonsense about the Iranian revolution is not an exception or aberration: Rather, it’s quite typical.

How do otherwise very intelligent people talk themselves into such absurd intellectual traps? I think that’s the most compelling question here. After all, it isn’t just the po-mo/theory-theory people who toss aside huge swathes of reason while maintaining selective bits and pieces to use for their own purposes – or even take the full complement of reasoning tools and apply them perfectly well to some subjects and deliberately twist them when applying them to other subjects. (The latter phenomenon bears mentioning, since a Jesuit was quoted in the article.) Rigorous, fallibilist critical reasoning is the most obviously useful and productive intellectual tool ever devised: If you disagree, how will you try to show that I’m wrong if not by critical reasoning, questioning what I mean by “useful” and “productive” for starters? Yet, for all its obvious and universal utility, almost no one actually does use reason consistently and universally as the foundation for establishing or evaluating beliefs. (I’m not necessarily saying I’m an exception, although I like to think I make a good and honest effort.)

So why is this the case? Why do even very intelligent people believe some outrageously stupid, completely unsupportable things – even though they are perfectly capable of critical reasoning and frequently demonstrate that capacity with respect to other beliefs? I’ve read several books that purport to answer this question, and I haven’t found any of the answers particularly satisfying. What do you B&W folks think?

I don’t know. It is seriously one of the large unanswered questions in my mental world. I have a few ideas, which may be partial answers, but they always seem only partial – in the sense of incomplete.

Maybe it’s just one of those brute facts. Brain chemistry. Maybe some people just do have more, or less, of a built-in aversion to believing absurdities than other people have. Maybe there’s no more of a ‘why’ to it than there is to eye colour.

Depressing thought though. I’d much rather think of it as something cognitive, that could be changed.

Not that I want to defend Foucault, but I guess he was no more immune to the zeitgeist than anyone else. The fact is that, at the time, the Iranian revolution was generally welcomed by the left and liberal media and opinion formers. After all, the airwaves across Europe (and the US?)were cleared to show Khomeini’s arrival in Tehran.

Charles Fox and Wordsworth, Wells and the Webbs (not to mention John Reed); hindsight is a great asset but is likley to be unfair to those who were trying to form their opinions at the time rather than afterwards. And they all, including Foucault, had the good grace to accept they were wrong when more information became available.

Just to add to Chris Whiley’s point, in 1979, it wasn’t exactly clear what the Iranian revolution would amount to and in the light of the past, namely the overthrow of Mossadegh and the imperially supported tyranny of the Shah, it was possible to hope for something different. Many Iranians were themselves so minded at the time. But Foucault’s momentary enthusiasm was less due to any information he had than that he was “into” revolt for its own sake, rather in the manner of, if differently positioned, Camus, so the invitation to absurdity was deliberate, as ostensibly unavoidable.

Just to briefly address G’s point, one might consider the repeated insistence of Habermas that his “formal pragmatics” is fallible, inspite of his insistence on its criteria to make his arguments. I myself prefer the notion of more or less rational criticism to that of “critique”, since nowadays everybody and their grandmother carries a “critique’ in their back pocket. But if the “formal pragmatics” of communicative action/rationality fails, it fails at the level of the aporias beneath the level of its “formal” disambiguation.